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5 Stats That Explained the World This Week

By IAN BREMMER

January 12, 2014

The right statistic is often worth a thousand words—and sometimes much more than that. These five weekly data points, put together by Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the risk consultancy Eurasia Group, provide a glimpse into global trends, political dangers and international power dynamics. Some are counterintuitive facts. Others are small stats that tell a big story. This week, Ian looks at figures from the price of milk in Greece to the surprising wage rates in China—and what they mean for everybody else.

A liter of milk costs around 1.5 euros in Greece, reflecting dairy prices that sit 30 percent above the European Union average. This is in part thanks to “Presidential Decree 13” from 1999, mandating that milk must be removed from store shelves after five days (it’s 10 in other European countries). Even small reforms can matter in an uncompetitive economy.

Forty-two percent of Americans now identify as politically independent—the highest percentage recorded by Gallup in the last 25 years. This makes sense at a time when Congress’s approval ratings remain in single digits. So what happened 25 years ago? It was the moment just before Ross Perot became a household name.

In 2013, three countries—Turkey, Iran and China—accounted for more than 50 percent of all identified journalists who are currently imprisoned for their work. Bear in mind, this only includes the verifiable cases; with complete information, the numbers would no doubt skew dramatically. Here's a chart of offenders worldwide:

Even though China’s private companies are much more profitable than its creaky state-owned ones, wages in those government enterprises are 70 percent higher than they are in the private sector. The preferential treatment extends far beyond compensation. This makes Beijing’s recently announced economic reforms that much more necessary—and that much harder to implement.

Russian stocks typically trade with a price per earnings (P/E) ratio—defined as market price per share divided by earnings per share, and typically an indicator of investor confidence in the future of a company—at below six. In contrast, the S&P closed 2013 with a P/E ratio of around 16.6. This is just one sign that a lack of investor confidence is hurting Russia’s business climate.